PARK CREDITED WITH NEW YORK CITY’S FIRST PLAYGROUND SLIDE
In New York City 114 years ago today, editions of The Sun newspaper published a short item on the bottom of an inside page. Although years later various historians would claim that the traditional playground slide was invented in 1922 in England, The Sun clip credits the park now known as St. Vartan Park as home to the first such slide in the city and perhaps beyond.
Called St. Gabriel's Park for nearly 75 years after its 1904 opening, the park placed the pioneering slide in a playground that was then located on the west side of the park near Second Avenue (in the area in the above 1934 city photograph of the park playground).
The July 4, 1909, The Sun piece reports, "In the city parks having playground for children one feature sure to attract the visitor's attention is the slides. The slide in this form originated in the New York Park Department. The first was put up in October 1906, in the girls' playground at St. Gabriel's Park... and it at once proved immensely popular, as it has ever since remained.
"The slide of this sort, a kind of glorified cellar door, is a permanent installation. At the top it is about six feet above the ground and ten feet long. For about two feet at the lower end of the slide is level and it ends with a vertical fall, like a step in a stairway. The level stretch checks the child's speed at the end of the slide, and down its vertical face the child's feet drop naturally to the ground, and then with the slight momentum still remaining from the slide and natural impulse to keep moving the child moves out of the way of others coming down.
"Alongside the slide and placed at the same angle as it and with cleets nailed across to give a surer footing is an incline leading to a little platform at the top, this incline being guarded and the platform surrounded by a railing."
The story notes that "not long after the first playground slide was installed," a second went up at DeWitt Clinton Park in West Midtown Manhattan, "where it proved equally popular."
